Website evaluation and other things

I spent most of the last week working on mapping out and evaluating the Library's Website. Mostly just showing where links go, how the pages of the Website interconnect with each other, and if the link to outside Websites should be kept or not. I was doing this work at home, because it was easier and it was also the only time I could work on it. The Librarian did tell me that I did not have to look at the Subject Guides, but I realized that since everything is being converted over to Lib Guides that it would be easier and better to make sure that those links were still good anyhow. That is a very slow process. Trying to judge Websites on good information but are no longer updated, takes a lot of thought.

For today I did a fairly quick look through Amazon to find some books for two new classes next semester. This was not that hard, except for trying to find books that were written for a lower division academic level and not for the average home owner or experienced worker. But considering the subjects were Construction Inspection and Construction Project Management, you should expect the students to know something or be willing to learn the complex codes and regulations anyhow.

For a while, I was the only person from the college manning the online reference desk. It was not that bad, there was only one question. The student wanted to know if they had to have their student ID to check out a reserve book. Simple answer (which actually is that they do not, and I told them I thought they did, well. . . they will need it anyhow) and that turned into helping them find out where to get the ID and then how to find the reserve book.

Finally, the Librarian and I spent a couple of hours looking over Films on Demand Database. We were trying to figure out how to make everything work, what its limits were, and what its features were so that he could then give the college faculty an orientation on it later. Overall it is a fairly simple and straight forward system to use. There looked to be quite a few interesting video clips on a lot of subjects.